The wraps came off the new National Art Center in late January, revealing Kisho Kurokawa's tour de force in all its glory. The sinuous, bulging facade is remarkable enough, but it's the vast atrium inside that undulating skin of celadon-green glass that really stops you in your tracks.
As you enter this gargantuan space, filled with light and crosshatched shadows, you pause involuntarily, as if for mental genuflection. But this is not some cathedral of echoing emptiness. It is a public area -- you enter free of charge -- where people are already congregating, to meet, chat or just read the newspaper over coffee from one of the self-service concessions. It is also currently the most in-demand lunch venue in the city.
No building can aspire to landmark status these days unless it boasts a restaurant with serious name-brand recognition. The National Art Center has achieved a major coup by enrolling French master-chef Paul Bocuse, for this is not just his first foray abroad but the first operation he has ever sanctioned outside his native Lyon.